THE HILL
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old ...” “And when we die
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips,” said I,
“Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!”
“We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said;
“We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!” ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave, true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Perhaps as magical as any of Mr. Brooke’s work is a longer poem called The Fish,—a remarkable and original piece of fantasy that makes the sub-aqueous universe vivid and real to the senses of the reader, and opens to him a new world of imaginative experience. Even the opening lines will serve to indicate something of the curious trance-quality:
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o’ the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides ...
In other of these poems, one is struck by Mr. Brooke’s passion for ugliness. He loves to take the most hideous and base facts of life and give them a place in his work alongside the things of beauty. It would be hard to find anything more humorous and at the same time more repulsive than this: